Gradual Lies

Niklas Jung

Goethe-University Frankfurt

Lying is standardly defined as asserting a proposition while believing it to be false (c.f.
Chisholm and Feehan, 1977; Meibauer, 2005). This definition presupposes a binary conception of both belief and assertion. However, both notions are more plausibly understood as admitting of degrees. I will argue that lying is best captured as coming in degrees.
Belief is best conceived not as all-or-nothing but as a matter of degree, i.e. credence. Speakers almost never assign full credence of 1 but typically hold weaker degrees of belief. Furthermore, assertions also come in degrees. The illocutionary force of an assertion varies with the speaker’s degree of commitment to its content, which is modulated by commitment specifiers. While specifiers like ‘I think’ or ‘I’m not sure’ weaken the illocutionary force of an assertion, specifiers like ‘I swear’ or ‘definitely’ strengthen it (Krifka, 2021, p. 65).
Consequently, given that both belief and assertion admit of degrees, determining whether something counts as a lie requires taking both gradual dimensions into account. I propose that the degree of lying is best defined as the difference between the degree of the assertion and the degree of the belief. This approach offers a more fine-grained understanding of lying and captures the intuitive idea that some lies are stronger than others.
I defend this view against an alternative graded account of lying (Krauss, 2017), which replaces the belief condition with a “worse-off” condition, according to which lying requires that the addressee is left in an epistemically worse position. However, this does not include bald-faced lies, because these do not leave the audience in an epistemically worse position. While one might deny that such cases qualify as genuine lies, Krauss’s account depends on this exclusion, whereas mine does not. 
This framework has implications for ethical evaluations of lying, as it allows for more fine-
grained distinctions between different strengths of deception.

Literature
Chisholm, R. M., & Feehan, T. D. (1977). The intent to deceive. Journal of Philosophy, 74(3),
143–159.
Krauss, S. F. (2017). Lying, risk and accuracy. Analysis, 77(4), 726–734.
Krifka, M. (2021). Modelling questions in commitment spaces. In M. Cordes (Ed.), Asking and answering: Rivalling approaches to interrogative methods (pp. 63–95). Narr Francke
Attempto.
Meibauer, J. (2005). Lying and falsely implicating. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1373–1399. 

Chair: tba

Time:

Location: